The configuration changes made to the Marketo SFDC frame will affect a number of fields during the syncing process. Previously Marketo had two packages in its Salesforce AppExchange: Marketo Lead Management (MLM) package and Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) package. This current configuration update will remove the MLM package, and the MSI package will not require MLM for installation. With the expiration of MLM package, Marketo has stopped support for syncing those 16 fields which were under that package. Hence, users might experience a few issues occurring while updating and syncing those fields such as, incorrect data in Salesforce reports. Here is what you need to know about changes made, how to address probable issues caused by changes made, and how to add Marketo fields.

Impacts of Marketo configuration sync changes

As new fields will be formed in Salesforce, fields in Marketo will be re-synced to newly added fields. This will trigger the backfill process which will stop the syncing with previously created fields. Thus, the data update process will be suspended immediately. Thus, every data which has the reference to the older dataset and fields will stop syncing and updating. Another issue caused is the backfilled data added to new fields will replace older values in Marketo and will be the only data set available in SFDC.

Fields that will be affected in the Marketo configuration change will be the following 16 fields. Data from these Marketo fields will stop syncing to the related SFDC 16 fields on the ‘Lead Object’ and 16 on ‘Contact object’.

Lead Score

Acquisition Program

Acquisition Program Id

Acquisition Date

Original Search Phrase

Original Source Info

Original Source Type

Original Referrer

Original Search Engine

Inferred Company

Inferred Metropolitan Area

Inferred Phone Area Code

Inferred State Region

Inferred City

Inferred Postal Code

Inferred Country

Other issues and areas to be affected by Marketo and Salesforce sync changes include –

Workflows

The Workflows in Salesforce enables users to automate processes in SFDC and execute actions based on any criteria set. As the Marketo-Salesforce changes stop syncing of specific fields of data, the workflow rules which are associated with older fields will refer data those were stopped getting updated. Thus, the backfill processes will affect the workflow and make it react in another way than expected. Therefore, new data se will influence your workflow and will be seen in place of precious data value.

Apex Triggers

Apex Triggers is that which allow users to execute actions, before or after changes made to the records as well as to execute various other tasks, similar to workflows. Once the Marketo will stop syncing old value, Apex Triggers will fail to trigger any action afterwards.

Also, when the new values will be added to the fields over the existing values by backfill processes, will cause apex triggers to trigger actions based on new values and will not perform as expected.

AppExchange Apps

AppExchange app will also function erroneously once the new valued will be synced by the backfill processes and will not be able to perform, as desired based on the older values or will not perform as they had performed earlier.

Formula Fields

Similar to Marketo’s formula fields, Salesforce formula fields also use multiple fields and mix those fields to create new value for the value of formula fields. As the creation of the value of formula field depends on other fields, values of fields affected by Marketo and Salesforce sync changes might fail to return inaccurate field value.

Also, if the mapping of those affected fields gets changed and when the formula field will refer to those fields, the formula field will perform calculation based on the outdated data and will return an outdated formula field value. However, if the formula field will refer to new fields, then the field will retrieve data from those fields that are not backfilled. However, as soon as backfill processes will complete and all the data will be updated successfully, the formula fields will start performing accurately.

Reports

Salesforce reporting tool sources data from various locations. Similar to the formula fields, when reports source data from those fields affected by the Marketo changes, the reporting tool will fail to produce accurate data as well. Once the syncing process will get stopped, Salesforce reports will not be able to demonstrate updated data. As the reports will retrieve data from new fields, the reports will display two different set of data. The first set of data will appear when the backfill process is continuing and the field values are not updated. Thus, reports will not be able to show updated data. Later, as the backfill process has successfully completed updating process, the fields from which reports source data will be updated and reports will display accurate results based on the updated field values. Thus, you can avoid the issue of wrong reports and field values as all the fields will be updated with the new value by backfill process. Users will receive a confirmation notification from Marketo once the backfill process is finished stating the updating process is complete users can perform actions on updated set of data.

Do you find these tips and solutions helpful or do you need professional Marketo assistance in your Marketo and Salesforce integration projects? Just talk to our Marketo certified experts at (408) 502 6765 or connect us via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get informed of all latest trends, updates, and tips on Marketo platforms.

It’s been a big decision, full of analysis and also some tensions – but now that your migration to Marketo is finalized – what’s next?

Migration to a new marketing automation platform from another can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve got a large number of assets already created, including emails, and contact details, and especially those that are already involved with programs or campaigns.

Our clients who are looking for migration assistance at ShowMeLeads are often apprehensive about issues and risks of errors, duplication or missed data in the process of migration. There are, after all, movements of assets, data, and reporting on campaign progress. In the midst of all these concerns, there are ways to simplify and streamline the process of migrating to the Marketo platform with minimum hassles and errors.

If you’re thinking of (or if you have a need of) migrating to Marketo, here the following may give you a kind of ‘things to do’ list to help make that process more successful for you [and you can thank us later :-)].

1. Data collection

Begin the Marketo migration process by collecting data on just about everything, to make sure you avoid the risks of retracing to the former marketing automation platform and spending considerable amount of time later in order to make plenty of small changes while you are building on the new platform after migration.

In the data collection process, you should take an inventory of everything, especially your creative assets such as images, videos, PDF documents, and any external items added to the database. Then collect information on all your forms, templates of landing pages and landing pages themselves, plus templates of all your emails and other email assets.

After you have done all of this logging of assets, next you need to focus on programs – in this case, we recommend that marketers start with stocking up all the marketing programs while keeping a spreadsheet of all the smart lists and flows that your program impacts the most. While documenting, create a separate tab in the sheet for complex nurture programs. After logging these, you also need to take in your operational programs (e.g. all the data management and lead scoring pro) into the inventory.

2. Data auditing

The data in a migration plays crucial roles since all the programs, emails, reports, engagement, communications, sales opportunities, and other areas. That’s why it is important to ensure your data is in good condition. After thorough collection of all the data, assets and templates, the next step would be auditing data in the process of migrating to the Marketo platform.

There are several things to keep in mind in this audit. First of all, make sure the data is clean and getting rid of bad data before the migration starts. You also need to check to see if the data requires normalization, and if the data is consistent throughout the database (fields such as country, city, and state values must be consistent, for example).

Also, to avoid data issues, you need to check if the database is fetching similar fields while switching to the new platform. Another important area of data auditing needs that your attention is that there are no duplicate data and that the new data get merged with the correct set of records on the receiving side. You also need to take care of how the data collected by forms and landing pages and if all the data is getting synced between Marketo and the CRM system while migration.

3. Update processes

Take this opportunity to evaluate your processes with data and marketing programs while you are switching from one marketing automation platform. Weigh your existing business processes, initiatives and practices to audit and measure strategies that are working for you and what not to optimize your marketing efforts during the migrating process. At the end of the evaluation process, you can come up with more effective marketing and sales processes, offers and content, lead generation strategies to engage your prospects and customers and improve your revenues against budget of migrating to a new platform.

4. Simplified naming convention

The naming convention is fundamental in order to simplify the process of migration to the Marketo platform. Apart from the migration process, the naming convention also helps marketers who are starting with a new marketing automation platform to have a clear and easy to relate names, making users more efficient and ensuring every user on the platform follows the naming practices.

5. Redirects

Many of our clients have loads of landing pages which are required to get redirected when they are migrating to Marketo. The first thing is to get a list of landing pages ready and incorporating that into the tab of landing pages of your Marketo migration sheet. Once this is ready, your technical team will have the list of pages for redirects and get it running efficiently in ways that make unlikely the risk of “404 error” error message popping up in the marketing operations.

6. Test everything

A/B testing is an inevitable part of the migration process. Make sure you start the testing process before you start migrating to the new Marketo platform. You can start testing all the links of landing pages, forms, make sample of all emails and test all of those and then, you need to audit all the programs. This testing process needs to be thoroughly planned and executed so that you do not miss anything left to be tested before you migrate. For some marketers and businesses, this phase might run a bit longer, maybe as much as a week or a couple of months depending on the volume of assets and programs you are migrating.

7. Extra marketing efforts

Before your new Marketo instance is up and running, communicating with your prospects and customers from two different marketing automation platforms can be difficult. For this, you need to have ready a short-term communication plan that may require you to communicate with your targeted audience through both the marketing automation systems.

Though this communication process will take a little more hassling and tedious, but this is necessary to keep the glow of communication consistent with their targeted audience. But, even though you are sending messages from two systems, your audience should not receive duplicate messages or they will report you as spam or unsubscribe from your campaign. That’s why you need to create a process that will prevent your prospects and customers from receiving duplicate messages from two different marketing automation platforms.

Apart from these heavy-lifting steps to be taken, businesses should not forget to prep the entire organization and activities for the probable bumpy roads ahead –

Make sure you do not forget internal communications to keep your employees updated of probable issues which may emerge while merging data. They must be well aware of the possible errors and problems that may occur with the bumpy road ahead such as, false notification of alerts, issues with assigning leads among others.

While migrating to the Marketo platform, especially merging a large amount of data may affect your marketing performance. You need to take an estimation of how the merging process may impact the performance of the system during migration. For example, if your business heavily relies upon the scheduled email messages or real-time sales alerts, expect these processes to get a serious hit by the migration process temporarily.

You need to pinpoint the possible risk areas and breakage points in the flow of marketing well in advance before commencing to the whole switching process. We advise cross-checking all the nooks especially risks of unwanted triggering of lead scoring process, CRM queues which sales reps rely upon, the hit on dashboards and reports, notification process to alert addition of new records, overall impact on the Marketo ecosystem etc.

Do these items help in identifying and fixing issues that can help you to get through your Marketo migration process with less hassles and pain? In addition to these practical tips and tricks, if you need to reach out to Marketo Certified professionals to get hands-on technical assistance in migrating your marketing process to the Marketo platform – you can simply reach us at (408) 502 6765 or DM (chat with) us via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – to get customized migration solution for your business.

The power of a Marketo marketing automation platform is immense and must be used carefully to ensure the security of the system. Marketo administrators need to make a number of decisions on how to assign roles and grant permissions for various types of user roles. The Marketo platform requires admins to exercise caution when managing users, as it houses a large amount of data, including the kinds of updates on leads, accounts and contacts, similar to those in CRM systems.

Marketo offers several predefined roles that can be set up with varying level of access, depending upon the amount of access to the data that users will need. Marketo administrators can select the right type of roles according to the positions and responsibilities of users from the following list of built-in roles:

Admin User – This level of users are given permissions to all rights, across various parts of the system, including admin section.

Analytics User – users who need to handle the measurements and monitoring of the campaign are assigned with the role of this analytics built-in role. Permissions given to these roles are limited to the ‘Analytics’ section.

Marketing User – Marketers are assigned this role with permissions to throughout the system, minus the ‘Admin’ part.

Standard User – Similar to the ‘Marketing’ user role, standard users are also given permission to all parts of the application, except Admin section.

Web Designer – Web designers are given limited access to only the ‘Design Studio’ parts of the Marketo application.

All the user roles and permissions can be modified to change the areas of permissions as per the changing requirements of access to the application, except the Standard and Admin User roles. Administrators can also create other types of custom roles based on the specific requisitions and organizational structures of any company.

So, the question is how administrators can assign permissions to roles in Marketo?

The types of Permissions are tied to the particular types of roles and requirements to access on Marketo application. Before you assign permissions to any user roles, you need to consider following factors I your decisions:

Things to consider before setting permissions to roles:

The “Access” permission can be given to a role when any user just needs to view the programs or occasionally need to make some changes to some parts of the system.

Users can simply have the permissions to monitor or see when they are initially leaning how to create assets or make changes in any part of the Marketo application even if they do have the rights to make modifications or take any actions to those parts of the application. if any user make an attempt to access those assets or activities, they will soon be notified with a warning message stating the limited access given to them.

If any user role needs access to perform any specific actions such as, “Create” or “Delete”, that user must require the “Access” permission to the specific part of the application where they need to make changes or create any asset. Hence, if any user role in your organization needs rights to ‘Edit Campaigns’, they must be given the overall permission to access the ‘Marketing Activities’ parts of the application.

So, what type of permissions can be given to user roles in your organization?

Types of permissions Marketo enables administrators to assign to various user rules are:

Access Admin (you can make changes to different settings under the ‘My Account’ part of the Marketo application). This level of permissions include access to make changes to any settings of any part of the application including Access Audit Trail, Access Audit Trail, CRM, Channels, Landing Pages, Email Admin, File Upload, Login history, Location, Objects, Activities, Munchkin, Sales Insight and many others.

Access API that limits ‘read-only’ permissions of users to ‘API Only Role’ depending on the type of API they need to access such as, Read-Only Activity, Read-Only Campaign, Read-Only Assets, Read-Only Activity Metadata, and various other types of read-only access along with ‘Approve Assets’, and ‘Execute Campaign’ permission.

Access Analytics access is given to specific user roles that need to access the ‘Analytics’ tabs, various types of reports, ‘Email Insights’ ‘Access Revenue Explorer’, ‘Delete Report’ and ‘Export Analytics Data’ unless they are unchecked to restrict access to that specific part of the application.

Do you need expert professional guidance and assistance to define specific levels of functionalities in your organization and how to manage various roles? We guide Marketo users with best practices to manage user permissions and also in-depth trainings on how to control, make changes and remove permissions assigned to any specific roles. Whether you need tips, best practices or guidance on Marketo user management, just say us ‘Hello’ by calling (408) 502 6765 or connect and chat with us via social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – we have it all you need.

Most marketers look at the concept of an email preference center as an unnecessary part of their email marketing activities, and frankly some view it as a waste of resources. But in our privacy-conscious world, and contrary to what many people think, a Preference Center can give you peace of mind. Without these centers, marketers cannot get a self-reported and even comprehensive set of insights and information on their targeted customers. Nor can they identify if they are interested in their products, newsletter, periodic updates content, or other offers.

Here are a few things about email preference centers that can help you to move forward with one – what it is, how it works and how an email preference center can help boost the performance of your email marketing campaigns. In short: a simple way to improve your long-term client relationships.

First things first: Define the email preference center

An email preference center, or a subscription center, should be the first part of an email registration process, because of the unobtrusive way it can help collect information from your targeted customers.

It is a check point where email subscribers can update data about themselves, including their own preferences in receiving emails. By offering this kind of choice, you enable your subscribers to take control over the type of content and information they want to receive from you. Also, they are given choices to decide their preferred frequency in which they want to receive mails and how many mails they want to receive. That will give marketers with useful insights about their prospects, which they can use to personalize campaigns and customize messages, based on subscribers’ preferences, leaving overall powerful impacts on their email campaigns.

For an in-depth look at how an email preference center can benefit and empower your ongoing email campaigns, scroll down and check out these bullets on the advantages of setting up an email preference center.

Benefits of email preference center

1. Lessen incidences of unsubscribes and spam reports:

Often marketers have no idea why their subscribers choose to unsubscribe from their email lists – but with an email preference center, they can collect information on why prospects are unsubscribing from their campaigns. In addition to that, an email preference center also helps marketers by giving alternatives to their subscribers who are contemplating unsubscribing, giving them reasons to keep the relationship at least somewhat intact.

Broadly speaking, there are three things your subscribers do to exclude themselves from your email list and these are

unsubscribing from the list

managing their email preferences

reporting your email address as spam.

With an email preference center, and a “manage your preferences” option, you take a powerful pre-emptive step so that they are far away from clicking the ‘Report as spam’ button. That option to regulate how many or frequently they will receive your communications, and the type of content and information they want to receive, is powerful preventive medicine.

2. Showcase your email offerings:

Another major benefit of having an email preference center is to be able to showcase marketers’ email offers and content. If you have multiple email lists, then take advantage of an email preference center to make your subscribers aware of your multiple email lists. Email preference centers not only allow subscribers to unsubscribe but also, choose the email lists they are interested in to get periodic updates and newsletters. Thus, they can select their preferred and most relevant email list and communications.

Here one thing you need to make sure of: you must have adequate content ready for every email list you have created to maintain a steady flow of good quantity and quality of content for your subscribers. For example, if your subscribers prefer tips and tricks or DIY type of content, make sure you have enough relevant content of that type. Similarly, if you let them choose lists by their professional profile, roles or industry, your content inventory must feed them with relevant content useful for those profiles and industries.

3. Get help in segmentation:

Email preference centers are of great help in segmenting prospects and targeted customers. These centers free marketers from doing the guesswork for their email marketing campaigns by enabling them to give their subscribers choices and personalize campaigns based on their insights on their preferences.

Based on subscribers’ email preferences, it becomes easier to accurately segment them and deliver personalized campaigns to keep subscribers engaged and take actions as stated by CTA. For example, you can create email preference center similar to Groupon which has categorized their centers based on multiple factors that are location, notifications, and types of deals.

Other factors that you can consider for creating email preference center and delivering personalized emails can be –

Type of messages:

Use email preference center to allow your subscribers to self-select their choice of content they want to receive and engage with. By this, we mean that let your subscribers choose topics of content, offers that attract them the most, type of news and their choice of new product updates which will bring them closer to your product and service lineup. Thus, you can target better with an email preference center by sending them customized promotions and product announcements and in return, you will decrease high attrition rates of your subscribers.

Frequency options:

Build an email preference center which gives you the ability to regulate the frequency with which your subscribers want to receive emails from you. That way, you can reduce the risks that your subscribers will become annoyed with too many emails and eventually unsubscribe from the list.

If they have a choice to set frequency, they can now receive emails at their preferred intervals. In the same way, you can use their frequency choice information to set the right timing and automate campaigns accordingly. This insight about frequency can help you determine how many emails they want to receive as double assurance that they won’t hit the “unsubscribe” button down the road.

Preferred channels:

An email preference center will also allow your subscribers to set their preferred channel through which they want to receive content, engage with your brand, and communicate with your campaigns, letting them self-select from various channels such as, websites, email campaigns, social media channels, mobile, paid ads etc.

This way, you can not only reduce bounce rates and complaints about your campaigns, but you can improve engagement rates, email deliverability, and sender reputation with most Internet Service Providers.

Formatting:

Email experts repeatedly recommend this email best practice which is to allow subscribers to choose desired format of emails. And it is another major benefit of email preference center that it lets prospects to choose if they want to receive emails in their preferred version such as, mobile, HTML or text. Thus, you can deliver emails to your subscribers in their preferred readable format and increase engagement with your emails.

Address update:

These email preference centers or subscription centers are extremely beneficial for both subscribers and marketers, also by easing the address update process with the email list. For many reasons, subscribers may want to change their address whether they have relocated, changed of jobs, etc. An email preference center allows updating their contact address, without much difficulty. This can include information such as physical residential address, email address, home phone numbers, work phone numbers and mobile numbers. It greatly helps marketers to stay updated of their prospects and marketers contact details effortlessly.

An email preference center is imperative to enhance your personalization, relevance, email deliverability, and engagement. As well, it will decrease bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, spam reports, complaints and the possibility that you will get stuck with a negative sender reputation.

Now, the question is what type of email preference centers do your email marketing campaigns require? Find out which kind of email preference centers you need, how to create and dos and don’ts to remember while building here – Types of Email Preference Center – Dos and Don’ts of Subscription Centers.

If you’d like some expert professional guidance and assistance to set up a Preference Center, let us know. Call us at (408) 502 6765 or connect and chat with us via social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – we have it all you need.

Account-based marketing begins by selecting accounts that are considered the highest value accounts. These accounts typically have larger numbers of employees and more key decision makers involved.

However, with the advent of newer technologies and marketing tools, ABM will soon move out of the realm of larger enterprise accounts and into smaller sized accounts, providing more personalized services to a broader range of clients.

The concept of account-based marketing developed in the B2B realm, where companies wanted to deliver both sales and marketing solutions. Following these strategies below, you as a marketer will be able to add more than MQL value to the sales team, enabling your marketing team to have an impact in the sales process with insights on sales and deeper engagement with key decision makers.

The following cross-channel ABM strategies will help improve outreach and engagement with account members through a broader range of marketing channels.

Account-based marketing strategies for social channels

1. Get account mentions on social channels

You might be talking about these accounts on your blog, in other articles or case studies, or other gated and ungated content, but one of the best ways to improve reach and engagement from your target accounts is simply to mention them on social channels. You can mention or tag the account or key decision makers on social media channels. This will not only bring you their instant attention, but, also influencers in their social network.

2. Facebook custom audiences

Facebook advertising is another excellent social channel that will enable you to identify the right audience and accounts. You can garner social insights from such personal details as name, date of birth, phone number, email addresses, geographical location data, gender, Apple or Android’s advertising identification etc., to define target accounts and zero in on appropriate advertising activities on Facebook.

3. Tailored audience on Twitter

There are several ways you can take advantage of tailored audiences on Twitter in order to boost reach and engagement from targeted audience. These include:

a. As an advertiser who can insert a list of targeted Twitter profiles to whom you’d like to reach, to market and to sell.
b. Mention the Twitter tag in order to retarget viewers using Twitter ads.
c.Retarget your targeted mobile app users when you are promoting your mobile app through Twitter ads.

4. Make a list of Twitter handles of influencers in your target accounts

You can simply reach out to the key decision makers of targeted accounts through Twitter, by making a list of their Twitter handles. You can follow them, add them to the Twitter list or set notifications to get automatically notified when they tweet. Remember that while you follow them or add them to the list, they will instantly get a notification of your activity – so you can attract their attention to your profile, page, your tweets and your business.

Scan through their threads of their tweets, their followers, people they follow on Twitter, like, Retweet and comment on their Tweets to engage with them to start interacting with them. In that way, you can focus on the Twitter profiles who are interested in your product, service or offers.

5. Targeting company on LinkedIn

Another social media activity to target account companies is to target them on LinkedIn. You can use the LinkedIn ads tool which allows marketers to perform company-level targeting, to define company accounts on LinkedIn to target and to create ads for those targeted companies and key decision makers of those companies.

Account-based marketing strategies through email marketing

6. Make creative and informative email campaigns for ABM contacts

Email marketing campaigns are a great way to communicate on a more personal level with key contacts of target accounts. As a caution, however, you need to remember that sending emails that are unsolicited and too generic can get your emails reported as spam and put your email reputation at stake. On the other hand, you have the ability to get more creative, concise, polite, and more relevant while sending email. Remember that your contacts may start unsubscribing if you are sending too many mails, emails that are too long, or generally if you are not providing them with relevant information – which could, in effect, bring an early end of your ABM campaign.

7. Personalized email programs

Email offers one of the best platforms to initiate personalized communications with target accounts and key decision makers. Make sure you do not send batch and blast emails to your targeted contacts of our account-based marketing campaigns. Instead, create personalized messages that target the right contacts at the right time. One way to ensure better personalization is to add targeted contacts and decision makers to your own list of leads to follow up. The more personalized emails you send and follow up with your prospects, the more reach and engagement you get in B2B account-based marketing campaigns.

Account-based marketing strategies through direct marketing

9. Send gift boxes to key influencers and executives

Not just electronic gift cards, send actual gift boxes to your contacts, leads and prospects. So, along with that personalized email engagement programs in place, create direct marketing campaigns to send them gift boxes as seasonal gifts, special occasions and special dates, right on their desk. Accompany the gift box with a message with a personalized note, current stats or some other information they value. A real gift will delight your prospects and increase their odds of becoming customers.

10. Why just key employees? Send them all

Here you need to take account of the size of the company and number of recipients while you are planning to send gift boxes to all employees of the lead account of the ABM campaign. You can send individual gift boxes for all employees or else, you can send a huge gift box with a lot of items that everyone in the organization could share. Your gifts will instantly impress the leadership team as well as employees of the company and they will want to know more about the great company that sent them the goodies. You can also create social media buzz on the gift giving event by tagging them with a message for them and maybe in return, they can also help spread the social media interactions by responding on those same (or different!) channels. Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of social affirmation?

Do you think these account-based marketing tactics could be useful or effective in your situation? Would you like to implement them in your ABM campaign? Call us at (408) 502 6765 or reach us via our social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get help and learn more tips and industry updates on account-based marketing.